No matter how much we tell ourselves that we don't know what it is that we really want to do, we all in fact, at least as adults who have had a chance to sample what life has to offer, know exactly what we want. The thing we want to do with our lives is usually the thing we spend the most time trying to talk ourselves out of. We try to convince ourselves to follow another dream, and very often we do for a long time till we realize the mistake. If we fail at something that we don't really give a damn about, it doesn't matter because we've never really risked anything. To go after the thing most dear to our hearts and be told we're no good at it, that is a wound which is all too true.
As adults, we have learned to protect our hearts, to do everything we can to avoid serious emotional injury. The danger with following the dream dearest to us is that to really do it authentically is to make oneself vulnerable. The Id and the Super Ego both want to discover and express this dream but the Ego will do everything it can to deceive us and protect us from what it perceives as a fatal threat. Even so the Ego can not hide the enjoyment we receive when we are fulfilling this secret desire, though it will still try to lie to us, often by trying to find this we like ALMOST as much but that we don't really care about.
So how do you figure out what it is you really want to do with your life? I've been studying this question in depth for a while now. Here's a list of questions and quotes gathered from and inspired by sources wiser than myself. If you're having difficulty finding your path in life, try asking yourself these questions, and remember, you're not allowed to edit or criticize yourself. Gift to yourself the permission to "be stupid and ridiculous" because any attempt to edit is your ego trying to throw yourself off the scent of your path.
1. On his nightly television show George Lopez said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Your calling will be the thing you do the best with the least amount of effort." The truth of it is that the reason that it seems to be the least amount of effort is you enjoy what you're doing so much you often don't realize how much time, energy and work you've put into doing that special thing because its a labor of love. Think about when you were a little kid (or heck even now), the small amount of time and effort it takes to take out the trash seemed the greatest burden in the world, but the countless hours, blood, sweat and broken bones you gladly sacrificed in the summer to build a tree house or a fort was no trouble at all. What do you do exceptionally well but seems to take no effort at all?
2. Revisiting the previous question, Joseph Campbell was quoted as saying that people completely misunderstood him when he told them to follow their bliss. Many people have come to think that he meant you should do the thing which made you "happy" or was fun, they had come at Campbell's theory of bliss with an entirely superficial perspective of immediate gratification. Campbell was later quoted as saying, "I should have told them to follow their blisters". Campbell believed one's "calling", was not the thing that made you superficially happy, indeed when you're doing something that really matters to you it can cause a great deal of stress and anxiety. Campbell believed one's "calling" was the thing which gives us a sense of fulfillment. Studies have shown that the most difficult and grueling jobs on the planet are also the ones with the highest recorded job satisfaction. This is not because a job has to be difficult in order for it to be fulfilling but because the jobs were so difficult there was no way anyone would last in them unless it was where they were really meant to be. What is the thing that you spend countless hours at, that you don't even mind or notice when your hands are bleeding and covered in blisters? What is the thing you can't walk away from until you know it's been done right?
3. Forbes magazine recently suggested that one way for their readers to figure out what it is they really want to do is to ask themselves, "If money were no object, if you never had to worry about money again and you had enough money to do or create anything you wanted, what would you do?"
Three seemingly simple questions that when put together paint a much large picture of who you are as a person. When you're really allowing yourself to be free and honest with yourself, do your answers ring out together into a unified answer?
I'm lucky in that I've figured out mine do. Its not an easy path, and one I've been trying to dissuade myself from for decades but my path is that I'm a fine art photographer. Its scary because it feels like that is something that even within the art world is a hard sell but I'm going to make it work.
A book I would very strongly recommend to anyone in a creative field is "Make Art, Make Money". Its all about the Jim Henson approach to living as an artist.
